These days I was wondering what laptop GPU would be the easiest to maintain / simplest to configure from a laptop POV?

Considering NixOS (I see Nix as gentoo++) or arch.

Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

Would prefer open source but am not Uber passionate (results > means).

Fictional use case is mid tier game development - ray tracing is nice but stability and minimal effort to keep stable while pushing decent amounts shader/polygons is more important vs peak perf/px. No bitbro / artificial guess.

Experiences & recommendos?

  • ForbiddenRootEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    Onboard Intel/amd? “Discrete” Intel/amd/nvidia?

    I have two laptops of this sort in use currently: One is a more recent AMD (5600H) + Nvidia (3080) and the other is an older Intel (some 10th-gen mobile) + Nvidia (2070). Both combinations work fine without any particular fiddling, apart from installing Nvidia proprietary drivers, on mostly any recent distro.

    My use case is general desktop usage, Rust / C development, and occasional Steam-based gaming on these machines. Both laptops run pretty much the same as they did on Windows (GPU-wise). Fedora seems to work the best for me with everything setup nicely out of the box barring non-free stuff required from RPMFusion. On the Intel + Nvidia one, which is my distro-hopping laptop, I have used pretty much all distros without issue as well. Nix is however not included in the list of distros I have tried, but Arch is.